


Tyrion's Horrible Long Night

by jalendavi_lady



Series: How The First Queen-Above-The-Neck Earned Her Name [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Episode: s08e03 The Long Night, F/M, Flashbacks, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Relationship(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Wights, Wine, internalized ableism, past emotional/psychological abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 10:31:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18715243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jalendavi_lady/pseuds/jalendavi_lady
Summary: A rock hewn room lit with only candles was the last place in the whole of Westeros that Tyrion Lannister should have spent any amount of time in.His queen ordered him into the crypts.He obeyed.





	Tyrion's Horrible Long Night

**Author's Note:**

> PTSD flashbacks in media are all too often shown as going back to the there and then without awareness of the here and now.
> 
> But it's also possible to get flashbacks that layer emotional reactions and/or sensory memories on top of what is currently happening without losing track of the here and now.
> 
> This is a tale of that second sort.

Tyrion Lannister started doing his best to get absolutely and completely drunk as soon as his queen allowed it.

There was no use trying to explain that he had already been down in the crypts - making sure Ned’s remains had made it and been interred properly, he’d caused enough problems for himself getting Lord Stark’s bones as far as Robb’s encampment that he needed to be sure the rest due him had been done - and he had no business going down there again.

The crypts were hewn directly from the rock and filled with torches and candles.

Which was far too like the older and more fortified portions of Casterly Rock, which were really just elaborations and expansions of the old House Casterly mines started when Lann The Clever moved in. Or married in. Stories differed.

The guard house was built out of just such a set of tunnels, and the little room formed when the stairs turned and widened into the crypt proper reminded him far too much of another little room with stone lions instead of dire wolves.

He didn’t even have the option of waiting until the last possible moment to go underground. Missandei enforced her grace’s command and gave Tyrion an absolutely withering look any time he so much as stepped near the stairs.

As least she didn’t try to take the wineskin away from him. Their queen probably would have.

Or maybe she would have been kind enough to let him stay drunk. It wasn’t as if his level of sobriety would change anything, after all.

No one noticed the dragonglass dagger he’d secreted away in his belt under the upper layer of his clothes. He might not be able to fight, he might not be allowed to fight, but he was going to at least have the personal dignity of being a man in armor - even if it was only a breastplate - with arms at hand - even if it was only a dagger - during the battle.

And besides, the last thing he needed was to feel helpless to defend anyone in a rock-hewn room underground with candles.

Except that he did still feel helpless.

And as time grew on and he slowly drained the first of his wineskins, the women arrived. Sansa at the last.

Now, he was in a rock-hewn room filled with candles. And the mingled scent of womanly terror and the male lusts of the husbands and lovers some of them had spent a last tryst with here and there in the castle.

By the time Sansa got there, he could almost hear the coins.

Much as it annoyed everyone, he kept talking now and then. Ranting about being caught underground, mostly. If he was talking, he was doing something besides drowning in emotional echoes he couldn’t keep above without doing something.

He couldn’t defend Tysha.

He couldn’t defend Sansa or Missandei or the girl with the burn who had anchored onto Varys as children so often did.

Jaime and Brienne and Podrick might already be dead. Any of them. All of them. There was no knowing.

He was on another rant about how maybe he could see something if he was only up there, maybe he could help somehow if he wasn’t trapped underground with scared women and candles, when Sansa flat-out told him he’d already be dead if he were up there.

He knew she was right.

And then she kept going. Telling him the brave thing was to accept how little they could do, instead of pretending they’d be any good to the battle.

It calmed him more than a slit window with a clear view of the stars would have.

It was a fresh grounding in the reality of the here and now: all he was good for was being one person among the noncombatants with enough battle experience that maybe he could do something if the battle got into the crypts.

It was a fresh grounding in the reality of the then and there: all he could have done back then was all he had managed to do, held in place as he was by two guardsmen who had each had twice the weight of him at 16 before they’d put on their armor for that accursed watch.

All he could do was all he could do, and he couldn’t berate himself into a multiple handspan growthspurt through the sheer power of feeling inadequate.

“Maybe we should have stayed married.”

The words slip out of him unbidden as he’s pulling himself together enough inside that maybe the remaining wine will be enough to make it through, but they are the truth.

He needs someone in his life who can tell him when he’s wrong without inspiring him to grow defensive. And Sansa has just managed it with a few words and no preparation.

She tells him it wouldn’t work. After letting him know he’s the best she’s had on offer.

Of course she tells him it wouldn’t work.

He already knew that, no need to point it out. The echoes of his father’s speech after are too in his ears for him to need it pointed out. It’s a testament to how low House Stark has fallen that he’s the best she’s been offered.

There’s nothing of value he could offer her. Even the influence of his position as Hand - as any sort of adviser to Daenerys at all - could be over at any time and leave him begging the Lady of Winterfell for a blanket and a sheltered corner in her castle as defense against dying of hypothermia in the Northern winter night.

She told him the potential conflict in his loyalties is the impediment.

Obviously she thinks his position is less tenuous than it truly is. Or that he still has resources beyond a single trunk of clothing that could even now be ash or smashed, the clothes currently on his body, one dwarf-sized breastplate and matching backplate, and a dragonglass dagger that technically belonged to her castle armory anyway.

Missandei spoke in support of Daenerys before Tyrion could offer his own correction. Needlessly, he thought. Sansa hadn’t been speaking against the queen, exactly. More like announcing that Daenerys needed his full attention and loyalty and Sansa would be a complication that Sansa did not want to create. But there was no way he could correct Missandei in front of Northerners. And especially not in front of the Wildling children.

* * *

Tyrion heard the sound of the dead rising last of any of them. His mind had become so focused on the past despite all his efforts to remain in the here and now that the scratching blended in with the rolling of long-ago coins.

At least he had long ago trained himself not to show thoughts of the past on his face.

He had just been thinking of how badly he’d be taking this night if Sansa hadn’t gotten her own brand of sense into him earlier and how he needed to thank her later when the screaming started.

Sansa took shelter behind her father’s grave, no doubt seeking his protection one last time.

Tyrion took shelter behind her father’s grave, secure in the knowledge his remains had been prepared in the manner of the Faith of the Seven when someone’s mortal leavings needed to be transported great distances.

Bare bones didn’t make wights.

Sansa leaned back against the stone, breathing heavily in fear and terror. Tyrion could have done without hearing that.

He could almost hear Tysha’s muffled throat noises between the screams.

Somehow he kept things together enough that he could lean over to check around the corner.

He could dash out and try to take out more wights than he’d make.

He could stay put and protect Sansa to their mutual ends.

He could not do both.

He could not do both.

He could not do both.

A hand on his and he turned towards Sansa, pressing his lips together so he wouldn’t visibly grimace.

It was completely hopeless.

Sansa’s breathing was slowing.

But he hadn’t done anything but be as scared as her, but have his mind wander into that dark room where the castle guard had come through one at a time and...

There was no reason. The only thing that had changed was his hand under hers. It made no sense at all.

Their eyes met again, and then there was something determined in the look of her face.

Surely the she-wolf was not about to try to take down wights with her fists and teeth.

And then she looked away and reached into the clothing folds at her bosom.

Out came a full size dragonglass dagger.

Tyrion looked at her, oddly bemused.

Sansa had been armed this whole time.

She met his eyes again, still determined.

So, she was planning to fight her way through to the end.

He felt the corner of his mouth try to twitch up at the thought of Sansa Stark, niece and great-niece of how many men of the Night’s Watch, taking down at least one on her way out to equal the wight she would make.

He reached down and pulled his own dagger out.

Two each. All it would take is two each for them to leave the battle better than they’d entered into it. Not all 9,000 years of Starks since Bran The Builder. Not all two or three centuries with enough connective tissue left to rise. Just two each.

There was something in her face, but he had to be imagining things. That couldn’t be there. Everything was about to end for her and for him.

There was nothing he could possibly give in exchange worth showing any sign of affection to him.

The only thing he could give her was his presence, and that wasn’t worth much of anything on its own. Tywin had made sure he remembered that.

His father who had so carefully taught him that terrible night that Tyrion would never receive affection outside the family (and rarely inside it) except in exchange for money or access to power or some other price that he should never again be so naive to assume wasn't being paid.

His father.

His father who had valued dwarfs so lowly he’d wanted to drown one at birth.

His father had been...

Wrong.

Provably and unmistakably wrong.

He wished he had known this was possible all those years he'd spent crawling into decanters and brothels. Even if he had never received it, just to know someone could look at him that way and mean it...

He brought Sansa’s hand up to his lips and kissed her gloved fingers. He could almost imagine her pushing them towards him at the moment.

Or maybe he didn’t imagine.

Maybe it was the clang of full plate that he was imagining.

He smiled at her, trying to tell her without words how much this moment meant to him.

And then he turned away, leaned his back against the stone harder for a moment to bring himself back into the reality that this was the end for both of them, and then he was leading them through the disjointed terror of the room to the alcove Varys had pulled many of the children into.

He didn’t see Missandei anywhere.

He did see a lot of dead people walking around.

A quarter of them in full plate armor.

The sound of metal clanking on metal hadn’t been a memory after all.

He reached back blindly and his hand found Sansa’s knee.

He didn’t look back, but he knew she’d knelt behind him, trying to shelter with the others as much as she could while he got a better look at the situation.

He was the only strategist they had.

But how do you strategize against something that may not even have a mind?

Sansa was moving to stand before Tyrion even realized they’d finally been noticed and the clumpy wave of wights was moving toward them.

Then it was all a confusing jumble of cutting wherever he could get an opening, Sansa taking down at least as many as he if not more.

He felt pride in her strength and not shame in his weakness at that. There was no shame in being outdone by a Stark in this war. Only honor in fighting beside one.

They had pushed forward a bit, the better to give their arms room to move, when the remaining wights simply fell to the ground.

They stood blinking, Varys quickly joining them in morbid curiosity.

“How many did we get?” Sansa breathed a moment later.

“At least a score between you, Lady Stark,” Varys assured her.

“Are we safe now?” she asked next.

“I would presume,” Tyrion told her hesitantly.

And then he remembered he was Hand Of The Queen.

“Everyone stay where you have found shelter,” he ordered in as loud a voice as he could manage at the moment. “If our theories were correct, it’s all over now and we have won. But I would be wary nonetheless until we have heard word from above ground.”

He still hadn’t seen where Missandei was.

The three retreated again to the alcove with the children.

* * *

It was worse, now.

The remaining wineskins had been utterly destroyed underfoot.

The entire room reeked of terrified women.

And there was nothing to do but wait for someone to come to the door.

“Tyrion, what’s wrong?” Sansa asked in a very low whisper. “You look like you’re in pain. If you’re injured, it needs looking after.”

He shook his head, half-hoping the sound of coins would roll out of his ears and stay away this time. “Putting me down here was like asking Sandor Clegane to tend a bonfire,” he whispered back as lowly. “But my queen ordered so I obeyed. And you were right. I would have been killed out there. But the wine’s gone now and...”

“Shh. What exactly is the problem?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, it’s bad enough remembering it without...”

“That’s not what I meant. You don't have to tell me what you're remembering. I only need to know what’s making you remember.”

He closed his eyes, knowing he wouldn’t get out of telling her but not wanting to see the look on her face when she found out he could be brought so low by so little. Not after the look she’d given him when they were alone and sure they were about to die.

He didn’t want to see Varys’ reaction either, but then Varys probably knew enough to guess already.

“Being in a rock-hewn room. The candles. The smell of fear.”

The sound of moving cloth and then she was wrapping him up in her cloak with the outside inside, his nose buried loosely enough in fur that he could still breathe easily. “Keep your eyes closed and lean against the wall here. You’ve done enough to help us all. More than her grace thought you could. We’ll let you know if anything changes.”

There was kindness and soft affection in her voice.

He wondered if believing his father had kept him from hearing them there before.

He couldn’t see the candles.

He couldn’t see the roughness of the walls.

He couldn’t smell the fear.

He could feel the wine still in his belly pulling him down, aided by the knowledge the danger was surely over and the sound of Sansa softly talking with Varys.

And that was how Missandei found him when Grey Worm came to the door and called out her name over and over: blissfully passed out with wine still on his breath, wrapped in the Lady of Winterfell’s own cloak.


End file.
